nime: new interfaces for musical expression
a course at my master's program, itp. visit the course website.

aya karpinska
e-mail: ank212 at nyu dot edu

other journals: one || two(you're here) || three || four || five || six || seven || eight || nine || ten

|| journal two|| 25. II. 03 || plan the action.

this past week i was in csound hell. i decided to devote myself to completing a short, musical piece using csound. good god, what a nightmare. should you wish to subject yourself to the torment of composing using a text editor, go to csounds.com and download a copy of csound for mac or windows. it's a free, c-based programming language for creating electronic sounds. super-powerful, truly amazing range of sonic possibilities, but knowing a fair amount of music theory or digital signal processing theory would help. the sky may be the limit, but you have to build your world of sound sample by sample. anyhow, after about twelve hours of frequent crashes, furrowing my brow over the cryptic online manual, and countless mistakes, i ended up with a minute and twenty seconds of audio. not quite a piece, i'm not satisfied with the way the sounds interact. i'm used to composing using a graphic sequencer, so it was a true challenge to "compose" by rearranging lines of code. listen to the piece (mp3, 1.2MB) "the struggle continues". i employed some granular synthesis techniques to sound samples taken from a little 3D animation i did called "aiki". if you'd like to take a look at the source code, here is the orchestra file and the score file. after this experience, i have a better grasp of what kinds of sounds i will be able to produce for future compositions. i'm excited to use csound to produce and shape electronic sounds, however i hope i never have to use the environment to compose in!

i've given more thought to my instrument, and decided that it will make the most sense to only have two movable flaps - the two sides of the box. after all, the performer (me) only has two hands! why use a third flap, if i can never manipulate all three at once? this way i can also use the side of the box facing away from the audience to hold controls such as switches for patch changes or for cycling through the banks of sounds. after consulting with friends who have made their own electronic instruments, i realized i can just leave my BX-24 program as is, sending out MIDI note data. i was going to try and learn how to send out MIDI control data, but it may not be necessary. the two flex sensors (attached to the two movable flaps) will send out MIDI notes on two separate channels. when the two flaps are open simultaneously, something should happen other than a simple adding of two effects. what this third parameter will be, i'm not sure. for example, flap 1 controls pitch bend of sounds, and flap 2 controls time stretch. when flap 1 is open more than 2, maybe i introduce another effect, say, real-time convolution.

so, what to do next? i need to start playing with Max/MSP. how can i cycle through a bank of pre-recorded sounds? i want to get data from 2 flex sensors to change something in Max. maybe something as simple as a debug statement, but hopefully i'll get to a more musical interpretation of the data. i wonder how i should attach the flex sensors to the flaps of the wooden box? where should the hinges be?